Xiao-yuan Dong

Segmentation and discrimination in China's emerging industrial labor market

Abstract This article analyzes wage-setting behavior in four types of enterprise: state-owned enterprises (SOEs), township and village enterprises (TVEs), joint ventures (JVs), and foreign-invested firms (FIFs) in Chinas light consumer goods industry in 1998. We find that there is no significant difference among the four types of firms in the returns to education, while FIFs pay a wage premium for experience. Gender wage discrimination is found equally across all four firm types. However, the wage advantage enjoyed by urban residents seems to have disappeared across all ownership categories.

Soft budget constraints, social burdens, and labor redundancy in China's state industry

Abstract The soft budget constraint hypothesis of Kornai (1980) offers an attractive explanation of over-manning in public enterprises. Sometimes overlooked in the literature is the fact that governments, especially in transition economies, often use state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to pursue non-financial objectives and to finance the resulting social burdens with subsidies and policy loans. In studying a panel of about 700 SOEs, we find that hardening budget constraints, without at the same time relieving SOEs from their social burdens, was a major proximate cause of rising redundant labor in the early 1990s in China.

Gender wage gaps in post-reform rural China

In the Mao era, the employment status of women in China rose from one of the lowest in the world to one in which equality between men and women reached a level matched by few developing countries. Before the 1950s, women in China suffered from a tradition of Confucian ideology. Subordinate to men and destined to serve others, women had access to few formal employment opportunities and those that did suffered from wage and work standard discrimination. Under Socialism, leaders instituted policies designed to provide equal pay for equal work. Female work participation in urban areas reached more than 90 percent prior to the reforms and their sense of entitlement to their work and equal pay was high. Although wage discrepancies still existed in rural areas and the opportunities to work off the farm were limited by policy, the wage gaps in agricultural jobs were small relative to other countries in the world.

Parental Care and Married Women's Labor Supply in Urban China

Abstract The aging of the population and the dramatic increase in womens labor force participation have made eldercare and womens labor market outcomes a subject of considerable policy importance not just in industrialized countries but also in transition and developing countries. This study examines the impact of parental care on married womens labor supply in urban China using the China Health and Nutrition Survey for the period 1993–2006. The estimates show that Chinese women confront competing demands for care, not only among elderly parents but also between older parents and their own young children. Moreover, the estimates unveil striking differences in labor market outcomes between caring for parents and caring for parents-in-law: caring for parents does not affect the caregivers employment status and work hours, whereas caring for parents-in-law has a statistically significant, sizable, negative effect on the caregivers probability of employment and hours of paid work.

Women's Employment and Family Income Inequality during China's Economic Transition

Abstract Economic reforms and trade liberalization have brought profound changes to the Chinese labor market. In this paper, we apply the technique of decomposing the coefficient of variation to examine the impact of changes in married womens employment and earnings on income inequality among Chinese urban households. Using the Chinese Household Income Surveys from 1988, 1995, and 2002, we explore the differences between two phases of economic transition: the gradualist reform period (1988–1995) and the radical reform period (1995–2002). Our analysis shows that the public-sector labor retrenchment of the late 1990s has led to a drastic decline in the employment rates of women, especially those married to low-earning husbands, and the change in womens employment was a major force driving income inequality in post-restructuring urban China.

China's Transition and Feminist Economics

Abstract Since 1978 China has been undergoing transition from a socialist to a capitalist economy and the opening up to international trade and investment. This process has been accelerated by WTO membership. This article presents an overview of the gendered processes and outcomes associated with Chinas reforms, mainly focusing on the post-1992 period when the pace of reforms accelerated. The imperative for accumulation and efficiency has resulted not only in impressive growth but also in the weakening of land rights for women, disproportionate layoffs for women workers in state enterprises, rising gender disparities in urban and rural wage employment, growing income insecurity, declining access to healthcare, and the adoption of Western/global commodified beauty standards. While jobs are expanding in new sectors and foreign-invested enterprises, these jobs are often associated with poor working conditions. This volume argues for reprioritizing equity and welfare on the policy agenda.

Male-Female Wage Discrimination in Chinese Industry - Investigation Using Firm-Level Data

We use firm-level data to analyze male-female wage discrimination in Chinas industry. We find that there is a significant negative association between wages and the share of female workers in a firms labour force. However, we also find that the marginal productivity of female workers is significantly lower than that of male workers. Comparing wage gaps and productivity gaps between men and women, we notice an intriguing contrast between state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms. The wage gap is smaller than the productivity gap in SOEs, while the converse is true for private firms. These results suggest that women in the state sector receive wage premiums, whereas women in the private sector face wage discrimination. Copyright (c) 2008 The Authors Journal compilation (c) 2008 The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development .

Women's market work and household status in rural China: Evidence from Jiangsu and Shandong in the late 1990s

Abstract This paper addresses the question, “does market work improve womens household status in rural China?” using survey data of men and women working in Township and Village Enterprises in rural Jiangsu and Shandong. This paper measures household status by domestic labor time, responsibility for domestic tasks, and household decision-making control. It finds that women have lower household status than men, using these three indicators. Based upon regression results, this paper concludes that for women market wages reduce domestic work time and responsibility for domestic tasks but market hours do not. The nature of bargaining warrants further research since the evidence that financial resources contribute to increased household decision-making control is mixed. Should employment opportunities for women increase with Chinas membership in the WTO, improvements in womens household status will depend upon their wages and the gender wage gap.

The Feminization of Labor and the Time-Use Gender Gap in Rural China

Abstract This contribution investigates the impact of economic development on the feminization of labor in rural China between 1991 and 2006. Using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS; 1991–2006), this study estimates time use in three sectors (farm, off-farm, and domestic) and analyzes the contribution of four features of economic development to changes in time use. Womens share of paid and unpaid work has increased in both the farm and off-farm sectors, and migration is a critical determinant. Economic development is associated with a rise in absolute work time, although not an increase in the time-use gender gap. Measuring the feminization of labor with time use rather than labor force participation data may be relevant to feminist analyses in other regions and countries, since it enables a more nuanced evaluation of the impacts of economic development on changes in the well-being of women.

Enterprise Restructuring and Firm Performance: A Comparison of Rural and Urban Enterprises in Jiangsu Province

We examine the contrast in the experience of ownership reforms between urban SOEs and rural TVEs using a panel of industrial enterprises in Nanjing municipality for the period from 1994 to 2001. Our objectives are twofold. First, we study how the reform program of “grasp the large and let go of the small” has been carried out in practice by comparing the patterns of enterprise restructuring in the SOEs and the TVEs. Second, we investigate how the alternative reform strategy has affected firm performance in terms of the growth of labor productivity, total factor productivity (TFP), profitability, and worker earnings. We find a sharp contrast in the reform strategies of the SOEs and TVEs in two respects. First, the changes in the SOE sector were more gradual and involved more limited transfer of property rights than did the reform of the TVEs. Secondly, the reforms in both sectors exhibited selection bias but in opposite directions, with worse performing ones being the principal targets of reforms, among SOEs, and better performing enterprises being more likely to be picked for privatization, among TVEs. Our analysis discerns strikingly strong, robust positive effects of ownership restructuring on the growth of labor productivity, TFP and profitability in the reformed SOEs, indicating that the evolutionary reform policy for the SOEs has successfully reversed the trends of declining productivity and profits in these enterprises in Nanjing. We also find that among reformed urban enterprises, those in which private ownership accounts for less than 50% of shares performed better than those in which the majority of shares are owned privately. We find mixed evidence for the TVEs: privatization had no effect on firm performance in a group fixed-effects model but significant, positive effects in a firm fixed-effects model.